how to spark lateral thinking

How To Spark Lateral Thinking And Train Yourself To Approach Problems Differently

@ShaneSnow - www.shanesnow.com - #Smartcuts

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What is lateral thinking?

@ShaneSnow #Smartcuts

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Pretend you have a cake that you want to cut into 8 pieces…


… but you can only make 3 cuts

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How most people cut the cake (using conventional thinking):

Cut 1

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Cut 2


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Cut 3 (only 6 pieces!)


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Cut 1

How to cut the cake using lateral thinking:

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Cut 2


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Cut 3 (8 pieces!)


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Lateral thinking is when you turn problems around and

approach them from unconventional angles.


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The easiest way to make yourself use lateral thinking is to ask yourself a question that

forces you to change the angle at which you look at the

problem.


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Here are a few of my favorites:


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QUESTION 1:

How would a type of person of a different

background or expertise look at this

problem?


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FOR EXAMPLE: When James Patterson wrote his first book, he had trouble getting

his publisher to promote it…


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So he did what a regular writer

would never do and made his own TV commercial himself! (It worked.)


It was easy for Patterson to come up with this because his actual job was making TV commercials.

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QUESTION 2:

How have people in different industries than yours already

solved similar problems in the past?


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FOR EXAMPLE: When a hospital in London needed to fix problems with complicated

equipment changes while kids were on life support…


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They solved the problem by

studying what race car pit crews do to do the same thing in a very

different place.@ShaneSnow #Smartcuts

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QUESTION 3:

What if you had to use a different era of

technology, or a tool from a different job for

this job?


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FOR EXAMPLE: You know those terrible Blister-Pak packages that you get electronics in? (They’re impossible to open!)


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It turns out that a can-opener is the

easiest way to open them!

Repurposing tools from other times or jobs can be an incredible way to find breakthrough solutions.


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QUESTION 4:

What if you had to do this 10x better?

(So much better that you can’t just do more of the same thing.)


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FOR EXAMPLE: When Google’s R&D laboratory, Google[x],

decided to make a car that was 10x safer

than a typical car…


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Instead of designing better car parts, stronger frames, or doing lots of crash testing (like they

might have if the challenge was just to make a car 2x as safe)…


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…they designed a car that used computers and sensors to drive

itself and avoid accidents entirely. (At the time of this writing, Google’s prototype self-driving cars have had significantly fewer accidents than

human drivers—almost all of them were the Google car being rear ended by other drivers, and none of them severe enough to seriously injure.)


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QUESTION 5:

What if we had to do this 100 times

cheaper? (So cheap that you can’t just do the same

thing more efficiently.)


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FOR EXAMPLE: When Stanford students wanted to make

an infant incubator for poor countries,

instead of trying to make a $20,000

incubator a little cheaper…


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…they were forced to redefine the challenge

of “make a cheaper incubator” to “keep a

baby warm for $200.”

Which helped them make this:


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They had to make it so cheap that the

problem of “make a cheaper incubator”

became “keep a baby warm for $200.”

Which helped them make this:


90,000 babies lives saved, and counting

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Shane Snow shanesnow.com @shanesnow

Get a copy of Smartcuts for more on lateral thinking in history at http://www.shanesnow.com/smartcuts

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